What Are You Doing?

The title is the classic Twitter prompt. The popular answer is said to be "I am eating a sandwich" from those who don't use Twitter. Many Twitter users are far more creative, unfortunately many are less creative.

Twitter really took off in the UK when enough celebrities signed up and tweeted regularly to make Johnny Britisher realise they could sign up and actually know somebody on there, even if not in the biblical or down the pub sense. The famous celebrity tweeters provided insights into their day to day lives, often far more candid than anything they ever revealed through the usual celebrity publicity and self-glorification channels.

Then along came those who felt they had to establish a presence without actually having anything interesting to say. Their answer to the question "What are you doing?" would be something along the lines of "Good morning everybody!". Legendary cricket commentator Richie Benaud could get away with this at the beginning of every live broadcast as he would follow up with a series of insightful remarks on the forthcoming day's play. But not unimaginative UK celebrity tweeter (UUKCT). UUKCT would receive a flood of interesting replies and have a basis for the rest of their Twitter session. They wouldn't have to read anybody else's tweets and interact on subjects other than their wonderful celebrity self, just monitor their replies when not monitoring their group of favourite other UK celebrity tweeters. No imagination required and those who were favoured with a reply would say how great UUKCT was to all the non-UUKCTs they followed, job done, new book/CD/DVD/exercise DVD bought.

Now it seems the non-UUKCTs do exactly the same thing in ever increasing numbers. If anybody says "Good morning" and ends at that it makes me think of assembly at school when the headmaster would say "Good morning boys and girls" and we would all reply "Good morning Mr Lander" in unison, apart from the slower ones who created a slightly later "Lander" echo effect. So I don't reply, I leave their need for a response while not giving any information to their other hundreds of followers.

Similarly, if somebody says "How are you all?" there is no way I am going to give them something for nothing. If I told them how I was it would likely depress most days as I have felt pretty shit (excuse my French) for several months now and I'm not "all" anyway, I'm me. I may be British but I rarely talk about the weather for something to talk about, consider it rude to complain about my health from the off and don't believe in saying "I'm fine" when I'm actually pretty crap. If they already know about my gammy leg or rampant swine flu then they should ask me personally if they are interested, a general "How are you all?" does nothing to elicit a response from me.

So often I see a topic all over Twitter when I log in, but the punters who only ever read their personal replies don't have a clue and ask stuff like "How come I've lost 100 followers overnight?" even though it has been the hot topic for the last couple of hours and discussed in great detail.

Tell me what you are doing and it's an entirely different matter, capture my imagination and I'm in there with the best of them. I will tell an anecdote related to what you are doing, ask pertinent questions, advise how to improve the experience or even warn against if appropriate. I get to know you, you get to know me, we are no longer strangers who just happen to tweet at each other.

"What are you doing?" is the key to keeping Twitter interesting, tell everybody and it can fascinate, live life through others and they may just clam up and do the same. Interact, read other people's tweets even if they aren't in response to one of yours. Twitter are rumoured to be about to change this prompt very soon but however trite or generic it may seem responding in a creative or imaginative way to this simple question keeps it fresh.